


close your eyes to what you can't imagine

by stellatiate



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Commander Jean Kirstein, Corporal Mikasa Ackerman, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 10:18:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1815028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellatiate/pseuds/stellatiate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there is only room for the sun, the light of his life, the constant challenge to his existence. nsfw, scouting legion au.</p>
            </blockquote>





	close your eyes to what you can't imagine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



There are no stars in his world and that makes it a little darker.

Most evenings, Jean shutters himself into a room and scatters a paper trail along the desk, a deplorable habit that has sunk into his skin. And the mechanics of it carry his bones through the paces, slumps him over in a high-backed, rusty chair, and sets his brain to work over strategies.

Sometimes, though, he can feel the world quake, and all he envisions are the thunderous steps of humanity’s slayers running in the far distance. Tonight, it is a heightened sense more than ever, and in anticipation of the company of his strategist, his _friend_ , he tinkers with the pieces of an old, wooden chessboard.

“You’re still awake.”

She has learned better than to ask questions of her Commander, so she slips through a crack in the door and kicks it shut with the heel of her boot, brings in spirals of paper and a bottle trapped between her fingers. Her hair is twisted and pulled back into a plait, swinging behind her, tied with a fraying ribbon and tucked into the back of her cloak.

Her eyes are just as listless and absent as his.

“I thought Arlert would be in tonight.”

His face flushes with color, drains in a delicate pink across the apples of his cheeks. It can’t be helped; she has always had this unspoken amount of sway with him, even from the way his eyes track her movements all the way towards his desk, down to the simple fact that his face is warm simply from her presence.

“He’s busy,” she fills in, sits in the chair across from him and notches her legs up across the arm, twists herself sideways. The contents of her hand are spread across her lap—several marked maps and stamped documents and a half-downed bottle of whiskey. “You need a break, Jean.”

It isn’t like him to pretend that she cares for him as more than just a leader, but sometimes he just can’t _help_ it. They’ve done so much for each other as equals, saved one another countless times, and when she comes to him like _this_ , softly calling him by his name, he can’t see it any other way.

“We have so much to do, Corporal.”

“Don’t give me that shit, Jean,” and he flinches when she drops the liquor bottle onto his desk, rattles the entire structure of his carefully orchestrated chess set, “you’re one of the few people I can say I have known for years.”

The air is heavy because he _understands_ , heaven, does he understand. His heart is a graveyard full, littered with family and friends and lovers and all of the people in his life in between; there is still something sharp stuck inside of him at the thought of them all.

But Mikasa is right—somehow she always knows where to strike and when—so his shoulder slump in the defeat of her strategy.

“It feels longer than it should,” he says, thinking only of perspective, of all of the new people that traipse in and out of his life, people who are alive and dead within less than a week. “I still remember when I first met you.”

Mikasa is quiet, though now she leans towards the desk and slides one of the pieces—a knight—in the familiar, L-shape across the board, taking another rook with it. “You’re still shit at chess,” she smirks, “even when you play by yourself.”

And now that flush in his cheeks gains some color, turns angry and ashamed. Jean leans over the desk and snatches his rook off the board, glares lightly in her direction. “I only ever play with you, asshole,” he grumbles, “and Arlert, though he’s easier on me than you are.”

With her fingers wrapped around the neck of the whiskey bottle, Mikasa’s lips spread into a grin and her back arches in her seat, a carefully feline-like stretch. “I doubt we have a similar play style.”

She grins, twists the sticky cap off of the bottle, lifts it to her mouth. “I did say you needed to relax,” her voice echoes through the bottle before she takes a sip, features cinched the moment the alcohol burns down her throat. It is a new pleasure to Jean, alcohol is, because he’d never had time to stop in life for pleasures, not since he gained a conscience from his days in training.

Alcohol numbs all of his other thoughts, brings every single thing he’d ever wanted to do to the surface of his skin, bursting from inside of him. And he likes it, though he’ll never tell Mikasa as much, _he_ likes _it._

“Sitting in my desk chair naked and swearing at a bunch of splintered wood is not my idea of relaxation.”

Jean huffs, but he drags all of the black and white pieces back to their designated spots, ignores the way Mikasa’s mouth fastens to the bottle, whiskey dripping from the corner of her mouth and sliding down her throat. These matches are very often the opposite of relaxing, especially since Jean and Mikasa can hardly ever finish one without an interruption—

trust and _believe_ having his scouts barrel into his office with riding formations while he’s clad in nothing but socks and boxers

—but it leaves him feeling a little lighter, as if he is releasing all of those years of pent-up romance. Jean had turned many other places with a lot of brusque love to give, hard around the edges and soft, gentle in the center, but he’d never really traversed the plane of his relationship with Mikasa, not as anything more than her Commander and she his Corporal, his right hand, his protector, his _friend_.

Yet there was some dangerous thought in the back of his mind, finishing this game with her bare hips pinning his down in his desk chair.

“Your move first,” she says once he settles all the pieces, holds out the bottle of whiskey towards him. And Jean hesitates, but then curls his fingers around hers, twists the bottle out of her grip and downs some of the golden liquid luck, shakes off the burn as it melts down his throat, spreads through his veins.

Jean would never consider himself a critical thinker, but there are certain things that he cares about that can draw it out of him; Armin pushes him to the edges of his abilities with their strategies, Mikasa pushes him to the edges of his physical prowess when they are in the field, and every little limitless beauty in the world is what keeps him fighting for it.

But chess—chess is _not_ one of those things.

Mikasa moves her pieces around the board thoughtfully, and when it comes time for her to swipe his rickety, black pieces from the board, she does so with a chaste, private smile and a sideways glance as he pulls off his socks.

“Socks only count for you,” she says, prying her cloak from around her shoulders and discarding it, though it is Jean whose turn it is to relieve himself of clothing, “I thought maybe a handicap was in order.”

Maybe he should be offended (and maybe he starts to, with his mouth open and his hands braced on the sides of his chair as he starts to stand), but then she unfastens her shirt and pulls it off, fingers tapping for a moment against the ridge of her abdomen, before she steps out of the entanglement of straps from her uniform.

And he can’t help the way his features redden, the blush that spreads across the bridge of his nose and over his cheeks, because she doesn’t think twice as she hooks her fingers into her pants, rolls the tight fabric down the stretch of her legs, touches the tips of her fingers to her toes.

His eyes are glassy and her lips are quirked and chess— _chess is_ not _happening_.

But there is an adamant gleam in her eye as she sits down again, posture ramrod straight, head tilted upwards, thighs crossed. The hems of her socks are slightly undone and her hair drapes over her shoulder, tangles with the straps of her bra, but that is _all_. Her undergarments and her socks and Jean—

Jean’s shaky hands upend the chess board.

“Now, Commander,” she is quick to get to her feet, a vision of rosy skin and confidence laced throughout her voice, “I’m afraid you’ve lost.”

It’s a very minor discrepancy to cross to the other side of his desk, tap the underside of his slack jaw and fold her arms underneath his. Jean knows she can feel the rapid beating of his heart, because her fingers are spread over his chest, her chin digging into his shoulder blades.

“Don’t be a spoilsport,” Mikasa says quietly, her free hand drifting down to the hem of his pants, working her fingers between the straps and buckles fastened around his waist, “there’s no need to be a sore loser.” Her body is flush against his, her breasts flattened against his back, her hands wandering, touching, dragging across his body.

Her hands slip between the overlay of his uniform, crawling over the prominent definition of his hipbones, fingers curled around the length of him, and she smiles into his back, her lips pressed against his spine.

The door _barely_ wedges open before Jean is choking out a scream, a startled, aroused, _horrified_ yell of, “ _Get the_ fuck _out of here!_ ”

And though the door slams shut, Mikasa’s hands are withdrawn, her face tilted into his back, the precipice of their chess match tipped over and fallen into an impasse.

“We’ll finish this game another night, Commander,” her eyes glint when they make contact, and just like he is a lovesick teenager, the foolish boy lusting over the girl with the beautifully shorn jet-black hair, he ducks his head down.

There is no room for stars in his world—Mikasa is the _sun_.


End file.
